ONCE THERE was a
princess who lived in a beautiful castle. But while she was away an
enemy invaded it, and her faithful servants hid some of her
treasures in an old chimney which they hurriedly walled up. . . .

It is no fairy
tale I tell you. Do you see the beautifully carved pieces of jade
here on the mantelpiece in my New England bedroom? They came to me
from my mother, and are a part of a lovely collection she had; but
for three years they were walled up in an old chimney, in a room
where Russian occupation troops were staying. The Castle of
Sonnberg, more than four hundred years old, had of course many
chimneys running through its massive walls; but when I first bought
it I did not think of the unused ones as places to hide treasures.
Instead, they were merely something to reckon with in our plans for
renovating what was a badly run-down building.

Anton and I,
like many young couples with small children, wished to find a home
in the country. Our problems were the usual ones, with perhaps a few
complications which one would not experience in the United States.
In the first place, Anton was what is called in German "heimatlos,"
which means, literally, "home-landless." This made our first two
children also heimatlos, or without citizenship; our next two were
Austrian citizens; and our last two were born German citizens—all
without our having any choice in the matter.

When Emperor
Charles, of the House of Austria, abdicated in 1918, and Austria was
formally declared a republic, my husband's parents were among those
relatives of the Emperor who refused to recognize the new
government. They and their children were therefore declared
heimatlos, and compelled to leave the country. Anton's parents took
their children to Spain, where they continued to live until the
Spanish Revolution began, in 1931. The fact that Anton and his
family were forced to leave Spain, just about the time my engagement
to him was announced, changed our plans for our future life. For a
short time after our marriage we lived in Munich, in Germany; but
the Austrian government finally gave us permission to live in
Austria. We leased a house in Mödling, near Vienna, and there our
first two children were born—still, however, officially without
citizenship.

When one lives
in times of national crises, one's memories of political events tie
in oddly with one's memories of family life. For example, the
thought of the Socialist uprising in Vienna in February, 1934, is
for me bound in with my deep anxiety for my little son, Stefan, who
was seriously ill at that time. He was barely eighteen months old,
and his baby sister was less than two months old. Anton had gone to
the airdome on the other side of Vienna when I heard the guns
begin—first scattered shots, then the continuous fire of machine
guns, and finally artillery fire. My anxiety for my sick child, my
fear for Anton's safety whether he remained at the airport or tried
to make his way home, and the necessity for calming and reassuring
the servants when I was far from feeling any assurance whatever
myself—all this comes back to me when I think of that difficult
period in Austrian history. Chancellor Dollfuss was killed in a
similar uprising five months later, but in the meantime he had
declared an amnesty for the royalist sympathizers. This restored
Anton's citizenship, and also gave Austrian citizenship to our two
older children. The next two children were born as Austrian
citizens; but the seizure of Austria by Hitler in 1938 meant that
our last two children were registered as German citizens, and became
Austrian only after the defeat of Germany in 1945.

These later
events, however, were not foreseen when in 1934 our quest for a
house in the country ended at the Castle of Sonnberg. Although it
was thirty miles from Vienna—farther than we had expected to go—and
had lapsed into a deplorable condition after having been to some
extent modernized and remodeled about twenty-five years before, we
liked it so much that we decided to buy it. We began the process of
putting it in order by having it cleaned; and at least twenty
carloads of rubbish—papers, magazines, wrecked furniture, rags,
broken glass and dishes, and plain, ordinary dirt—were hauled away!

As so often happens, everything took longer than we had expected;
and since our lease expired at Mödling before the work was finished,
we moved into the castle while there were still twenty-four workmen
on the premises, and nothing was completely in order. Our heavy
furniture was brought in vans, and our car was loaded with small
oddments—including, oddest of all, a pony! When one lives in the
country, of course one wants a pony for the children. Ours had come
from a circus—a Czechoslovakian circus which I had often seen when
it toured Romania, and which I had been delighted to see again in
Vienna. When I asked the proprietor if he had any extra ponies he
would like to sell, he proudly presented me with a Romanian pony,
named Medias for the Romanian town where the circus was playing when
the pony was born. I was of course much pleased with Medias, but I
confess that he added no little to our transportation problems on
moving day!

In Romania, and
in fact in all countries of the Eastern Orthodox Church, no one
would think of establishing a household, even for a short time, in a
house which had not been blessed. The fact that others who lived
there before you had the ceremony performed makes no difference.
Each new start made in that house has its own service of blessing,
which consists of prayers and readings from the Bible, and includes
the story of the First Miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee.
Then a container of water is blessed, and this water is sprinkled
upon all the walls of the house. Asking God's blessing on every
beginning is something our church considers important. Not only
homes but all institutions—hospitals, schools, factories,
everything—begin their activities with this service of blessing.
With this same service my children and I began our new lives in our
New England home, on the name day of my elder son, Stefan. One's
name day, which is the day of the saint for whom one is named, is to
us more important than one's actual birthday. I was therefore happy
when at Sonnberg, the repairs finally finished, we were able to have
our ceremony of house blessing on the twenty-first of May—my
Saint's Day, which has always been especially dear to me because it
is also a special festival in the Romanian Church.

Many things of
course remained to be done in the castle. In parts of it central
heating had been installed, but this had to be repaired. Wanting to
be entirely modern, we converted the coal heater to oil; but we had
scarcely time to enjoy it before the war cut off oil supplies to
private citizens, and we had to reconvert the heating system to
coal. In all of this, as well as in the maddening struggles to
repair and to install electricity and plumbing in a castle built
before either had been thought of, Anton was able to plan for and
direct the workmen. An experienced pilot who not only flew but could
repair his own plane, he was a trained engineer, much interested in
mechanics. He was able many times to show the workmen how something
they considered impossible could be done; and later, as supplies for
repairs became harder to get, he kept our equipment in good running
order. The responsibility for directing and maintaining even so
small an estate as Sonnberg is something quite different from living
on a similar scale in the United States. How can I make you feel
that you have visited us in Sonnberg in the middle 1930's?

There is, first
of all, the castle to show you. It and the eighteen acres of ground
around it were perhaps best described by Anton's sister when she
said:

"In the center
there is a well; around the well stands the castle; around the
castle is an island; around the island is a moat; around the moat is
a park; and around the park runs a river!"

While this
sounds like a child's riddle, it is actually quite an accurate
description of Sonnberg. The castle had been built in the sixteenth
century. Square, and without ornamentation except for its tower, it
had its rooms arranged around an open courtyard with a well in the
center. Originally this location had been swampland; a marshy area
which a little river, dividing and then reuniting, had made an
island. Some sixteenth-century knight had seen the possibility of
locating a fortified dwelling here by digging a deep and wide
circular moat in the center of the marsh, heaping up the dirt to
create an "inner island" on which the castle was built. The
swampland outside the moat was tiled and drained, so that except in
very wet weather excess water was carried off into the river. We
lived, then, upon a double island, and crossed two bridges when we
left our castle.

The nearest
town, or what you would call our "shopping center," was nearly two
miles away; but the little village of Sonnberg was at our gates.
There were still standing some of the very houses that had been
built close to the castle for protection four hundred years before.
The village included the little church and the schoolhouse, which
served not only Sonnberg but also two other neighboring villages,
and there was a small general store as well as a baker's shop. When
one drove through the village and crossed the little river on the
castle bridge, the driveway continued across a narrow section of the
"outer island"—which was a parkland of woods and meadows—to the
moat. Here one crossed on a longer bridge, of six arches, where the
original portcullis had been located; and then the driveway led to
the entrance of the castle, with the tower rising in the center of
the front wall. On this "inner island," around the castle, we laid
out our gardens.

Tradition says
that the castle was originally three stories high, with the tower
two stories above it, but that the weight of the building had
gradually caused it to sink into the "made land" on which it was
built. Whether that is true or not, we found it only two stories
high, with the other floor hardly more than an unusually light and
airy basement. The castle walls are of course of stone, four feet
thick; but while the floors of the corridors around the inner
courtyard and some of the other passageways were also still the
original stone, parquetry had been laid over the floors of the
rooms.

Houses in
Austria are taxed according to the number of rooms in them, and we
were taxed on thirty-five rooms. Does this seem a large number? It
did enable me to set aside five rooms for my mother on one of the
sides of the "hollow square" in which the castle was built; but our
own household required a good bit of space. When the six children
had been born, there were eight in our own family; and in addition
to this number we had a staff of nine servants: cook, kitchen maid,
nursemaid, three housemaids, laundress, housekeeper, and chauffeur.
The gardener was also the farmer, and had his own house: but at the
castle, besides our occasional guests, there were always from
thirteen to seventeen people living; and when my mother visited us
she brought with her a staff of five or six people, in order to
relieve me of responsibility instead of adding more.

You must
remember that our household was not run at all like a modern
American establishment, which can have laborsaving devices and make
use of convenient and economical stores and services. Our laundry,
for example, was done by hand; and washing and ironing for a
household of that size was enough to keep a fulltime laundress
busy. Much of our food was produced on our own place, and when the
war brought increasing food shortages, we added to the number of our
livestock. Eventually we had about a hundred chickens, as well as
ducks, pigs, seven sheep, a cow, and bees, all of which paid their
way in an entirely practical manner and were not regarded as
amusements or hobbies. The farmer, the housekeeper, and I sheared
the sheep; and after the wool had been washed I spun it into
yarn—using a distaff, since I have never learned to use a spinning
wheel. This yarn was then knit into jerseys, socks, and other
articles of clothing for the household. I did much of this knitting,
and I also did most of the children's sewing—always by hand, since I
had learned to do it that way and not with a machine. Besides the
usual vegetables and fruit, we raised potatoes, wheat, and corn on
our own land, some of which was leased to the farmer. There was not
only the cooking to be done, but the canning, preserving, and drying
which stored up our winter food.

In addition to
supervising and sharing these practical and everyday duties, I found
time for the gardening, painting, and sculpture which I so loved. I
wanted to make the highest tower room into a chapel; and in
preparation for this I designed cut-stone insets for the eight
windows. For each window I used a different flower in the central
panel: iris, rose, lily, delphinium, tulip, thistle, hyacinth, and
water lily. I had got as far as cutting out the designs in wood with
the jigsaw in Anton's workshop, and having them copied in stone by a
workman I knew in Balcic, in Romania, when the war came and
interrupted this project.

—I loved those
eight panels! I had worked on them with devoted care, happy in the
thought of the use for which they were designed; and I had felt—as
one so seldom does about one's own work—that I had done them well.
Sometimes I wonder if by any chance they have survived the
destruction of our home. I wonder if—stacked at one side of a
basement room as they were when I last saw them— they were
overlooked when our lovely Renaissance furniture was broken and
burned; when our glass and china were smashed on the flagstones of
the courtyard; when the portrait of my mother painted by de Laszlo
was ripped to pieces and burned; when all of our treasures except
those few hidden by our horrified servants were either looted or
wantonly destroyed by the Russian soldiers. I did not return to
Austria after the war to see the empty shell that had once been our
beautiful home, and perhaps this makes it easier for me to go back
how in memory to 1935, and '36, and '37, when in spite of
threatening war clouds life seemed peaceful.

Besides the care
of our growing little family of children (for, as I have said, our
six children were born during the first ten years of our marriage)
and my necessary occupations for the household, and besides the
luxury of working on unnecessary but fascinating projects for
beautifying the castle and gardens, I found much to do in the
village. My children's nurse and I started a small dispensary for
infants and children, which was open one day a week. Many of the
treatments begun there had to be followed up at the homes, and I
made this my responsibility. When a trained nurse was required by
those who were especially needy, I arranged my other work so that I
could take over that duty as long as it was necessary. During the
six winter months I established and managed a canteen to provide
food for about thirty of the poorer school children, getting an old
woman from the village to do the cooking. I happened also to
discover a small and struggling troop of Girl Scouts in Vienna, and
I began working with them—organizing summer camps for them in our
park. We even had the joy of having English Girl Guides come to
teach us the latest ways of camping, which was an adventure for both
groups of girls. Throughout the year there were also the festivals
to be celebrated. At Christmas of course there was always the
Christmas tree party for all the village children, with gifts for
the younger ones and candy for the older ones, which I prepared and
wrapped.

Perhaps you can
see from this that my days were pleasantly and usefully full. In the
evenings I found time for my special recreation and joy, which is
reading, while my husband busied himself with his short-wave radio
transmitter and receiver, for he is an enthusiastic "ham." We seldom
went into Vienna, since we both found our home satisfying. In the
summer we took our children to a house on the Worthersee, a
beautiful lake in Kernten. Across the lake there were only the
Karawanken Mountains between us and the home of my sister Mignon,
Queen of Yugoslavia—a journey of perhaps thirty miles as the crow
flew, but much more difficult to achieve by road. With Anton's
plane, of course, we were not bound to roads. Sometimes we flew to
England; always we spent a few weeks of every year in Romania; but
our great events were the visits of my mother, and she found it
pleasant to spend a month or two with us now and then.

As I have said,
one of the four sides of the castle's "hollow square" was entirely
my mother's, and she arranged it according to her own taste. We
adored having her with us, and since she brought her own staff her
visits lightened my work a great deal—something I was especially
grateful for because I did not recover quickly from the births of my
children. You will remember, I confessed earlier that cooking and
planning menus had never been my strong point. For this reason I
appreciated my mother's bringing her cook with her; and she put me
at my ease by reminding me laughingly that she, too, as a young
housekeeper had urged her father to bring his cook along when he
visited her. He had protested a little, saying that he had been
invited to bring his gun, his horse, and even his yacht when he
visited friends, but never before had he been invited to bring his
cook!

My mother's
presence radiated life and light. I cannot here find words to tell
what she was or what she meant to me: that would in itself make a
book. Everyone loved her. Everything was nicer when she was
there—even the village children's faces took on a new look, for she
was always interested in each one. I remember that one year for
Christmas she crocheted a little cap in bright colors for each
child. You can imagine with what pride these small Austrian peasants
wore a headcovering made by a queen's royal hand!

But those
peaceful years ended in 1938, the year when Austria was engulfed by
Nazi Germany. For me the anxieties of that time were at first
submerged in a more personal grief, the death of my mother. I
remember so well how she had looked at the death of her own mother,
and how she said to me, "It is a terrible thing to be nobody's
child!" I was a little girl then, and I puzzled over what she had
said. How could one be "nobody's child" at any time? But in 1938 I
discovered that with Father and Mother gone, one's whole life
pattern is altered. There is still life to be lived; there are still
responsibilities to be carried forward; but in this world there is
no longer the loyal and loving security upon which one relies, often
without conscious understanding and appreciation of how much it
means. In castle and in village alike—"It is a terrible thing to be
nobody's child!"